Does retrieval-induced forgetting occur for emotional stimuli?

Abstract

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a phenomenon where the retrieval of an item impairs memory for items associated to the retrieved item. This effect has been robustly demonstrated with a wide range of stimuli. A few studies have investigated this phenomenon with emotional memories for autobiographical life events and for pathology-specific memories in clinical populations. The present study investigated whether RIF would be observed for stimuli of positive and negative emotional valence in the normal population. On a recognition test, the effect was observed both on measures of accuracy and response time with neutral words, but no RIF was observed for words of negative and positive emotional valence. In addition, RIF was observed only for studied items and did not extend to all members of the studied categories. This observation was made possible by the use of a recognition task in the test phase, and is accounted for in terms of episodic inhibition (Racsmány & Conway, 2006).

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Forgetting
• Retrieval-induced forgetting
• Recognition
• Memory

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Norwegian Research Council student award to the first author.

The authors are grateful to Øivind Solberg for programming the E-prime scripts, and to Ines Blix, Tor Endestad, Thomas Espeseth, Elke Geraerts and Francisco Pons for commenting on a previous version of the manuscript.